The relationship between GDP and winning is complex. At first look, there seems to be a positive correlation post 1972 when the gap of GDP becomes most apparent. However, for Brazil and Argentina, two countries that reaped two or more world cups, their GDPs were among the bottom at the time of their championship. Hence, it may be safe to say GDP function as a negative filter in that strong GDPs not necessarily correlate with strong performance in World CUP, but weak GDP is not likely to preclude a championship.

In order to understand whether the number of star players in each team affects the winning of the team, we sampled the top footballers (1962 – 2014) from two dataset, the World Cup’s top 100 footballers and the World’s Best Footballers in 2013 , from The Guardian. Since the World Cup’s top 100 footballers dataset does not have the data of 2014, we chose The World’s Best Footballers in 2013 dataset as a complementary dataset, which evaluates the overall performance of top footballers before the 2014 World Cup. Our visualization confirms the intuitive assumption that the number of the star players has positive correlation with the winning of the team.

Football culture is analyzed in three dimemsions: percentage of general players in each country; percentage of the total stadium capacity as measured against the population of each country; percentage of U20 World Cups won by each country with regard to total U20 Championships. We consider these dimensions as suggestive of how entrenched football culture is in these countries. Data from FIFA’s 2006 Big Count report. show the seven countries are similar in most of these areas. What stands out is the percentage of general football players in Germany, 20%, whereas other countries are about 7%. On the other hand, Brazil and Argentina seem to have reaped a significant portion of U20 winners.

FIFA World Cup Trends

This is a group project about “Decomposing FIFA World Cup Championship” from three aspects: Economics as represented by the Country’s GDP, Human Talent factor as represented by exceptional Star Players in each team, and Football Culture as represented by the popuarity of this game among the general public, including the youth, the general public, and oridinary football players.